Lawrence.com

Purchase, N.Y. — Peter Wiley was 11 and had been playing the cello for four years when his mother got a phone call from a friend recommending a new teacher.

The then-fledgling Guarneri Quartet was establishing a residency at Harpur College in Binghamton. Although it was a four-hour roundtrip from the Wileys' Utica home, they seized the opportunity for Peter to study with Guarneri cellist David Soyer.

For the quartet, it's the first personnel change ever. For Soyer, it's a chance to catch his breath after amassing a fortune of frequent-flier mileage for himself � and for his cello. And for Wiley, it's a dream that made his knees wobble when his former teacher popped the question.

"That phone call at age 11 just sent me on a path that I'm so fortunate to have been put on," the 46-year-old Wiley said. "So much of who I am is because of David Soyer. I never imagined I would be the cellist of the Guarneri Quartet."

Soyer passed the cello bow to Wiley at Carnegie Hall on May 9. To Soyer, 78, his finale meant relief from a 100-concert-a-year schedule.

Soyer will continue to be active, teaching at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, the Manhattan School of Music in New York, the University of Maryland and Boston University, and performing at Marlboro, Vt., and elsewhere.

Moving up the ladder

Soyer, who started teaching at Curtis in 1968, recruited the then-13-year-old Wiley to be among his first students there.

"My dad drove me down there and I got moved in," Wiley recalled. "It's quite a shock, actually, coming from a small city and going to Philadelphia and being on my own, being homesick, and being nervous that I would get kicked out of Curtis. That was the threat over my head: 'If you don't do well, they kick people out of there."'

Wiley, of course, didn't get kicked out. After graduating from Curtis, he spent a year with the Pittsburgh Symphony. Then, at 20, he became principal cellist at the Cincinnati Symphony, a position he held for eight years before deciding to explore.

	www.cello.org www.marlboromusic.org

"I decided it was now or never," he said. "I had nothing in particular planned, but I loved playing chamber music, and I started to go back to Marlboro every summer, and I was getting itchy to play as much chamber music during the year as I could."

In 1985, he moved to New York, and in two more years he succeeded the retiring Bernard Greenhouse as cellist with the Beaux Arts Trio.

The Marlboro Festival also was an important place for the Guarneri. It's where Steinhardt, Dalley, Tree and Soyer were matched together in 1964 by Alexander Schneider, violinist with the Budapest Quartet and close associate of one of Soyer's teachers, Pablo Casals. Schneider's brother, Mischa, was the Budapest's cellist and one of Wiley's teachers.

The many connections made Wiley the logical successor for the Guarneri.

"We all come out of the same musical page," Steinhardt said. "There was no other name that ever came up. ... We've known Peter since he was little. ... He grew up and became a professional cellist, and we've played with him in various combinations. So we loved his playing; we loved him; we admired him. It was sort of a natural, organic transition."

Compliments come easy

It was up to Soyer to ask Wiley. In April 1999, a year after Wiley left the Beaux Arts, he was driving near Carnegie Hall, heading home to Connecticut when his car phone rang. He still recalls Soyer's words: "'Peter, I'm tired of schlepping."'

"Then I had a sense," Wiley continued. "I was saying to myself, 'No. You're NOT going to say what I think you might be saying.' He says, 'The boys want to keep going, and they want to play with YOU.' Literally, my knees started shaking. I somehow said, 'Well, I don't see how I can do that. Let me drive home and speak to my wife.' I drove home and told her, 'How can I do that?' She said, 'You're crazy! What do you mean? Who wouldn't want to play with the Guarneri Quartet?"'